Flamberge is still in alpha, with a running Kickstarter, but what’s available so far shows enough promise that I’d like to give it a mention.

A strategy/RPG under development, Flamberge is built around simultaneous turns- both sides in battle give their units ten seconds worth of orders, then the actions paly out simultaneously. It’s more lightweight than many similar games- eg Mode7’s Frozen Synapse- but I found that served it well, making it a relatively light, fast, intuitive strategy game.

It looks and sounds pretty good, using the faux-oldschool Sword and Sworcery look to good effect. There’s a planned plot, but only the first couple of areas are available, so there’s only a brief look at it so far.

The best way to see what it’s like is probably to check out the gameplay videos on Kickstarter or try the demo, available for Mac, Linux, and Windows; if the demo is representative of the full game, I’m sold. At the time of this writing, there are a couple of days left on the Kickstarter, which has exceeded its modest goal several times over.

Revolution 60, produced by freshman indie team Giant Spacekat, is one of several games that I’ve been meaning to post about for some time. Released a month or two, it’s a sci-fi-themed adventure game, following the adventures of a Special Forces team attempting to regain control of a rogue space station. While mostly linear, it follows the Mass Effect model of offering frequent conversational options which affect the outcome of the story, tied with CRPG-ish combat and QTEs to move the plot along.

The plot is the main attraction; while the developers call the game an RPG, personally, I’d say it shares more in common with adventure games. The plot itself is pretty solid; it follows the adventures of a special forces team dispatched to liberate a space station from enemy forces- naturally, things go south quickly, and our heroes are forced to do the best they can in an environment with rapidly shifting loyalties and mysterious enemies. It’s a well-told story, offering both solid characterizations and tantalizing hints of the greater world in which the story takes place.

Combat is an action-RPG affair that brings the old Megaman Battle Network games to mind. Your character and the enemy each occupy half of a grid, which you’re free to move around on in more-or-less real time; attacks hit certain portions of the grid, so learning to dodge attacks from each of the game’s handful of enemy types is a must. Each of the game’s half-dozen enemy types comes with enough attacks aimed at restricting movement or controlling parts of the grid to keep things feeling fresh. My biggest issue with the combat is that it feels like the game’s early fights are twice as long as they should be- at that point, neither you nor your enemies have a whole lot of options, so it feels like running down their lifebar is an endurance match rather than a challenge. Control can be a little laggy at times, but I never really felt like I was being cheated by it (note that I played the iPhone version; this may be better on the iPad version of the game).

QTEs weave in and out through many of the game’s systems- they’re tied to both your ‘special attacks’ in combat and ‘action scenes’ in the ‘adventure’ section of the game. They’re relatively well-implemented here; there’s generally little penalty for failure in the adventure sections (often this amounts to getting a slightly different scene, or repeating the scene until you’re successful). Some of the gestures required can be a little flaky at times, but they worked pretty well on the most part; I think the game would be awfully flat without them, honestly.

While the ‘full’ game is a bit on the pricey side as iOS games go, it’s just that- a full game that’s neither tied to microtransactions nor a glorified match-3. There’s a pretty significant demo, too. I’d strongly recommend giving it a try- it’s a solid first outing for Giant Spacekat, and shows a lot of potential for future games in the series. It’s currently iOS-only and available here.

The esteemed Bennett Foddy gave a brilliant talk at Indiecade East on the history and current state of “indie games”:

Especially poignant to me is the fact that he starts out the talk with a quote from Edmund McMillen, complaining that the “indie games scene” no longer fits his definition of the indie games scene. In comparison, here’s something I wrote 9 years ago — when Edmund McMillen was just getting started — complaining that the “indie game scene” no longer fit MY definition.

I suspect a little digging could turn up a usenet post from 16 years ago, when I was just getting started making video games, complaining about how the indie games scene wasn’t what it had been in the late 1980s.

Upon its’ original release, Final Fantasy: All The Bravest was excoriated- and rightfully so- for being a $4 app which essentially amounted to, as Mike Fahey so eloquently summarized, $46 of in-app purchases looking for a game. Most of the complaints made then are still true: it’s still a series of fixed battles that you ‘fight’ by tapping on your characters; there is no ability to select which characters or how many come with you in battle; losing all your characters means waiting three minutes per character to get them back, or spending real money on DLC items; getting access to Your Favorite Character is a matter of getting lucky on pulls from a virtual gumball machine at a buck a pop.

That being said, the ‘base app’ has been dropped down to ‘free’. At that initial price for the core app, it’s much easier to justify as a nostalgia-fueled romp through the NES and SNES-era Final Fantasy games. It’s not very long- I finished it in something like two or three days of playing a couple hours now and then- and it does preserve the look-and-feel of the older games. The actual-money-costing items are largely bonuses; they’re not required to make your way through the whole game if you’re willing to let the game sit now and then.

I certainly wasn’t interested in buying All The Bravest when it first came out, and I didn’t end up putting any money into the free version at all. It does bring back all the characters I grew up with, though, and for free it was a nice way to hang out with them a little bit more.

So! Now that I’m all grown up and some sort of official game industry person, I finally made it to E3 this year. Here are a bunch of random observations:

I have never before seen “convention booths” that are two stories tall, and are so big that they have office space and a break room for the staff.

Everywhere I looked there were attendees sitting in rest areas, against walls, etc. with 3DSes. There were a few people checking their phones, but they were vastly outnumbered by the 3DS people. I saw zero people with PSPs / Vitas. Conversely, of the games being shown, there seemed to be significantly more Vita games than games for any other system.

The PS4 controller feels really heavy. The Xbone controller has a pair of tiny additional vibrators inside the triggers. The Wii-U controller is ridiculously unwieldy, and the few Wii-U games I saw didn’t use it at all. Some of the Wii-U games gave players the option of playing with either the Wii-U TV Tray controller or the “wiimote and nunchuk”, and everyone I saw playing those games was opting for the latter.

Both Microsoft and Disney are trying to make Minecraft. Microsoft’s version is called “Spark“, and Disney’s version is called “Infinity“. Infinity does that extra-impossible thing of trying to be Minecraft and Skylanders at the same time. Given Disney’s track record and resources (in terms of money, IP, and positive reputation), it’ll probably work.

All of the buses in downtown LA were wrapped with Dark Souls II ads, and there was a giant Dark Souls II billboard on the side of the convention center. Being a Dark Souls 1 fan I thought this was pretty neat, but on the other hand I thought it was weird that this much effort was being put into advertising a game that isn’t going to be released until March of next year.

There was an enormous 180 degree semi-circular screen with additional 60″ flat panel screens on huge robot arms, and a laser light show and a giant vibrating platform that people were herded onto. It showed a movie that simulated a sort of “mission control” as the US failed to defend itself from space nukes. As a huge timer counted down, the nukes rained down on the eastern seaboard, and then gradually made their way across the country to southern California, blowing up San Diego as the timer reached zero. The screen went dark, and then we were told that “10 Years Later…” there would be another Call of Duty game. They’re like cockroaches.

And here are the games I played:

Contrast (PC): This was my “game of show”. I played a PC build, but it was also being shown off on PS3. You control a little girl’s imaginary friend who can toggle between moving in the 3D world, and moving on a 2D plane as a shadow. Neat mechanics, great art direction. Feels like the full game will be pretty short, but long enough to be fun.

Octodad (PS3): I’ve been hearing a lot of love for Octodad for a while, and now that I’ve finally played it I understand. You play an octopus disguised as an average human dad, trying to do average human dad things, but with crazy flailing octopus tentacles, and delightfully-obtuse controls. It reminded me of QWOP, but much more forgiving and fun.

Rain (PS3): A surprise disappointment. You play an invisible little boy in a rainy city, who’s only visible when he’s out in the rain. There’s a similarly-invisible little girl who you’re following for some reason, and some similarly-invisible dog monsters who are trying to eat you for some reason. It sounds like a neat concept, but there’s just not much there in the execution.

Mercenary Kings (PS4?): I think this was playing on a PS4… I played it with a PS4 controller, but the controller’s cable led into a nondescript wall with no indication of what hardware was on the other side. I backed this project’s Kickstarter, so it was fun to get to play a little of it. I didn’t play much, but what I did play felt suitably Metal-Slug-esque, with some unexpected hints of Monster Hunter (namely gathering and crafting, and bosses who disappear into the underbrush if you take too long to defeat them) which was neat.

Puppeteer (PS3): Dynamite Headdy! No, really, it’s exactly like Dynamite Headdy, but a much bigger pill 3D. And you can’t attack. But otherwise the entire game is presented as a puppet show, there are huge crazy bosses, and you have interchangeable heads. Unfortunately, the pacing was really really bad, and the audio was broken on the kiosk I was playing it on, so I lost interest and wandered away after only finishing the first segment, even though I love Dynamite Headdy. Hopefully the pacing problem was just for the demo, or just the very beginning of the game and it gets much better later.

Open Me (Vita): A cute AR game that’s all about opening puzzle boxes. The boxes appear in “real” space through the camera, and you have to move around them to look at the various sides (no mean feat in the cramped quarters of the demo kiosk) while using the touchscreen to interact with them. The three boxes I saw all had a very “programmer art” look to them, which is a shame since I think this game could’ve really benefited from a “Hellraiser” aesthetic.

Tearaway (Vita): It’s that adorable papercraft game! Overall pretty fun, but marred by some bad platforming controls near the beginning of the game that made me have to redo a very simple jump a dozen times before I finally got past it.

Wonderful 101 (Wii-U): I think this was the only Wii-U game I played. And it really wasn’t fun. It looked really fun, what with being about dozens of tiny superheroes all working together to form enormous fists and swords and things out of their bodies (and they all have quirky little costumes with things like stoplights and toilets on their heads, and individual names and bios), but the gameplay was really chaotic and repetitive and instantly boring. The Nintendo guy babysitting the kiosk assured me that, over the three days that he’d been babysitting it and playing it off and on, he’d gradually discovered some really deep gameplay. I was somewhat incredulous. But not outwardly.

Fresh (Sifteo Cubes): Warioware for Sifteo Cubes. I’d played a different Sifteo Cubes game at Indiecade, and while this one was certainly much more fun, I didn’t feel inclined to play it ever again after the 10 minutes it took me to beat it, and the other Sifteo Cubes games I played really weren’t worth mentioning.

Hohokum (PS4): I only played a little of this at the very end of the day as they were closing down the Sony booth and pulling the plugs on the kiosks in the middle of peoples’ games, like the good old days when the arcades let you know it was closing time by turning off all the machines. It had sort of a groovy Keita Takahashi / Vectorpark vibe to it, and I was some sort of space tadpole, and I think I was supposed to find a mermaid and bring her to a fisherman. I’d just found the mermaid and was trying to figure out how to get her to follow me when the kiosk was switched off.

Toro’s Friend Network (Vita): A Toro game finally made it to the US! It’s Farmville!

olli olli (Vita): Played about 5 seconds of this until I discovered that it’s Canabalt on a skateboard.

Atelier Meruru (PS3): Played a few minutes of this where I ran around a house where exactly the kind of anime characters you’d expect to find in a game with “Atelier” in the title were just sort of hanging out. Apparently it’s some sort of super-generic JRPG. With a character named STD.

Frogger and Asteroids (Arcade): There was a classic gaming store that had some arcade games setup. I played some Frogger and Asteroids, and wandered away from both without finishing my first game. I also do this on the Galaga machine at my favorite hotdog place while I’m waiting for my hotdog. At this point I think I’ve spent more on unfinished Galaga games at a quarter each than I have on most iOS games. There’s some profound insight to be gained from that, but I don’t know what it is.

Tim’s new game and Brandon’s new game (Vita): I played Tim Rogers’ (and Brent Porter’s) new sliding-block puzzle game. I also played Brandon Sheffield’s new sliding-block puzzle game. I recommended that they combine their sliding-block puzzle games.

Games I did not play but feel that I should mention:

Knack (PS4): The premise of this game is the same idea that we all had after our first marathon session of Katamari Damacy, where we thought, “ooh, what if there was a more fighty game built around this same mechanic, and you start out fighting really small enemies, and gradually grow by attaching random junk to your body, until eventually you’re enormous and fighting enormous enemies”. However, the presentation appeared to be very very linear and scripted and totally contrary to the sandboxyness that one would expect from that premise.

Dragon’s Crown (PS3 / Vita): Between Sony’s megabooth, Atlus’s booth, and a couple other places, I think there were more kiosks playing Dragon’s Crown than any other game, but I still somehow managed to not play it. I’m honestly not that fond of brawlers.

Game & Wario (Wii-U): This really confused me. I loved the original Warioware, and liked Twisted almost as much, but it seems like every game in the series is getting further and further from the simple greatness of the original. As I watched someone else play, he first chose the specific minigame he wanted to play, then sat through a very long cutscene, and then played the same minigame over and over. And here I was hoping they were making a Warioware game.

Transistor (PS4): There were long lines for this every time I walked by, and I didn’t know anything about it, and finally found out at the end of the day that it’s the new Supergiant game, but it was too late to play it.

At first, Puzzle and Dragons seemed like something pretty cool- a mobile game which, roughly, combines something like Pokemon with a match-3. Form a party of elementally-themed monsters and explore dungeons with them; fight enemies by matching tiles. Monsters have special abilities that can be triggered with time, and can also be made more powerful by combining them with other monsters. Monsters come in one of five different elements- matching three or more tiles of a given element makes every monster of that element in your party attack, and may do more or less damage depending on their target’s element. The obligatory twist to the match-three gameplay is that rather than simply swapping a tile with one next to it, you’re given the ability to grab a tile and then drag it around for a few seconds, meaning that with speed and foresight you can put together a couple matches in a single move, or build ones larger than would otherwise be possible. With a variety of elementally-themed dungeons to visit, each providing a set of missions with a fixed series of battles, it seemed a pretty solid game.

I played it off and on for a couple days. As seems standard for microtransaction-based games, it featured two currencies- coins, which are earned with every dungeon run and are used for ‘normal’ tasks like combining monsters, and Magic Stones. Magic Stones are earned slowly; you appear to gain one every day, and clearing all missions in a dungeon for the first time gives you one as well. The latter can be spent to refill your stamina, continue if your party falls in battle, and gambled in a virtual gumball machine for new monsters.

That last bit is the sticking point.

After a few days, I’d assembled what I thought was a pretty decent party- strong enough, certainly, to complete the dungeons I’d run without a whole lot of trouble. The monsters you win at the conclusion of normal missions, however, are fairly generic, common types- weak slimes and goblins with the occasional mediocre warrior or decent Ogre thrown in. To get rare monsters, you need to drop a couple magic stones in the aforementioned gumball machine- something I’d done as frequently as I could. The first couple times, I got interesting, unique monsters that were akin to the fire-breathing dragon I’d started with in power; a Naga with the ability to stop enemies from attacking, a Golem with the ability to reduce incoming damage, a Knight with decent stats. My fourth spin, however, yielded the Hell Golem Mk. III.

Before every mission in the game, you’re compelled to bring a ‘helper’ along; a monster recruited from another player, either a “friend” or one of a handful picked at random. I’d observed in the past that an abnormally large number of these folks had suspiciously high-level nonstandard monsters, but I’d always chalked it up to folks who’d been playing longer than I was or had put all of their resources into building up a single character rather than spreading them around.

Hell Golem Mk. III was ranked five stars, denoting the rarest and most powerful tier of monsters. While specific five-star monsters are nominally the rarest in the game, getting five-stars from the slots couldn’t be that unusual, given the number of similar examples I’d seen helpers come with. Hell Golem Mk. III started at level 30; my highest-level monster was at level 15. Hell Golem Mk. III, like the other five-stars I’d seen as helpers, was significantly more powerful than the rest of my monsters put together.

Seeing my carefully-assembled party so totally outclassed by a virtual die roll pretty effectively killed my desire to keep playing the game. Why bother leveling my party up, when simply spending Magic Stones was so much more effective? I tried running another mission anyway, with the Hell Golem on point. Having effortlessly steamrolled it, I sighed, hit ‘home’, and deleted the app.

I’ve said before- perhaps not in this space- that this sort of nonsense is the bitter fruit of the race-to-the-bottom that is app pricing; I draw a direct line from the inability to sell a game on the App Store for more than $3 unless it has the words “Final Fantasy” in the title to reliance on microtransactions and ‘encouraging’ investment of real money into the game. In this case, the advantages that could be won with a fistful of Magic Stones and a moderate amount of luck were so great that building a party the ‘normal’ way seemed a waste of time- and without the need to strategize and work my way up that ladder, there didn’t seem to be any purpose to playing the game at all.

Maybe this is an argument that, despite previous evidence, it is possible to strip too much gameplay out of something- or at least that it’s possible to go too far in providing a real-money end run around it.

Like most 90s kids, I have very fond memories of the original A Link to the Past. In its’ day, it was an amazing game- like Super Mario World before it, a quantum leap beyond what the NES was capable of in size, depth, and complexity. It was a great game and I’m not denying that for a second.

On the other hand, like most of the other games in the series, it was a standard world with a fairly straightforward design. While the game had a plot, there were precious few characters and nothing particularly compelling about the world’s setting. Nostalgia is nice, but beyond that I don’t see anything terribly compelling about a return to A Link to the Past’s Hyrule over an original take on the world.

Is there really anyone chomping at the bit to go back to Misery Mire and fight that giant goddamn blob of eyes again? More to the point, anyone who wouldn’t already pick up something with “Zelda” in the title?

I’m usually more than willing to excuse companies for wanting to revisit their successes and port and re-release their old games- heck, I love the fact that I can now play many of my childhood favorites on my phone- but this really does feel like an attempt to capitalize on nostalgia rather than creating something new.

I’ll be honest and say that it’s been a while since I’ve really followed the doujin scene, for various reasons. I’ve stopped following most of the gaming message boards I used to hear about them on, and the indiegames.com feed focuses much more heavily on western projects these days. While I still feel the danmaku itch occasionally, I usually scratch it by means of Cave’s back-catalog. Still, when I first heard about the two Danmaku Unlimited games, I was happy to see something fresh.

Donmaku Unlimited and its sequel Danmaku Unlimited 2 are a pair of doujin-style shmups for the iDevices. Although they’re a bit on the easy side compared to many of their contemporaries, they’ve got decent graphics combined with solid mechanics and controls into a very nice overall package.

To get the front-matter out of the way: visually, both games are solid if unremarkable; they’ve opted for the generic planes-and-spaceships sci-fi motif rather than the moeblobs that have plagued danmaku shmups for the last decade or so. The audio in the first is mediocre, but the second introduces a soundtrack worth digging out headphones for. Both games control using the familiar drag-anywhere-to-move-your-fighter method used by Cave’s iOS ports and Taito’s Space Invaders: Infinity Gene; it’s missing the ‘dead zone’ at the bottom of the screen that the Cave ports include, but it’s otherwise solid. It is a bit more generous than Infinity Gene, however; you won’t have to worry as much about enemies ambushing you from the bottom of the screen, and onscreen buttons are kept to a minimum. The second eliminates onscreen buttons entirely, using up or down swipes with a second finger in their place. It’s a little awkward at first, but feels very natural once you get the hang of it. DoDonPachi’s influence on both games is clear: both feature ships wielding both a wide, ‘bullet’ spread and a narrow, more powerful beam weapon.

The meat of most danmaku games comes to their scoring systems; the DU games use a combination grazing and combo system. At the top-left of the screen is a multiplier- this starts at 1x and builds up by increments of .1 as you graze enemy bullets. Grazing many in succession yields a combo; large combos both yield bonus points and build up the multiplier more quickly. Your multiplier is reset to 1x if you die or bomb, and decays rapidly if it’s over 100.0x or you take too long to defeat a boss. Also in play is a system similar to the Hyper mode of the latter DoDonPachi games- destroying enemies and grazing bullets builds up a ‘trance’ bar which, when filled, can be triggered to increase your offensive power and the value of point items dropped by enemies for a limited time. Finally, there’s a Shikigami no Shiro-esque system in play as well, whereby destroying enemies when you’re near bullets or other enemies yields a multiplier up to 16x. I haven’t determined if this is additive or multiplicative with the multiplier yielded by grazing; potentially, it could provide huge stacked bonuses.

Danmaku Unlimited 2 tweaks most of these systems. The game features two modes: Classic and Burst. Classic is similar to the original, save that your multiplier is now connected to collecting certain itmes rather than building up graze combos. Burst Mode changes things up a bit- your standard secondary laser is replaced by giant beam with the ability to destroy enemy bullets and change them into multiplier-boosting items. This beam is charged by collecting a third new type of item from destroying nearby enemies. I’m quite fond of the change- instead of offering screen-clearing bombs that you’re penalized for using, Burst Mode gives you a secondary ability which you’re rewarded for learning to use effectively… It’s something that I’d like to see in more shmups.

Although I’m not going to complain about this too much in my capacity as an unremarkable shmupper with the deteriorating reflexes of a man in his early 30s, both Danmaku Unlimited games seem fairly easy by comparison to many of their competitors. Although you start with a limited number of lives and continues, you’re given more as you play through the game on a fairly generous basis, and both allow you to take several hits before you die as well. The touchscreen controls give you far more control over your speed and direction than more traditional D-pad-style controls; once you’ve acclimated to them, you’ll have far better control than you would from a keyboard. Looking through the global high-score list, it looks like there’s a maximum score that many players of the original Danmaku Unlimited have hit. The second is better, but it’s also pretty clear that ‘serious’ players are thin on the ground, even if only because I was able to land in the top 25.

All in all, though, I’m pretty happy with the Danmaku Unlimited games. They’re both solid, high-quality doujin-level efforts with solid mechanics and a control scheme that makes me wonder why more PC shmup developers haven’t embraced the mouse. I’d strongly recommend that fans of the genre give the two a try- freedemos of both games are available on iTunes.

I missed Arcen Games’ A Valley Without Wind when it was originally released, but seeing stories about A Valley Without Wind 2 come across the indiegames.com RSS feed piqued by interest. Consequentially, I decided to give the original a try.

Reality has shattered, creating a new world out of broken pieces taken from different times- Ice Age plains abut abandoned contemporary cities and robotic junkyards from the far future. This new world is also filled by the Wind, which seems to scour the very souls of everything it touches. The survivors of this catastrophe have gathered together in a few settlements, beset by evil Overlords and their minions but protected by mysterious intelligent stones. These stones have created Glyphs to aid the survivors, which allow humans to resist the wind beyond the guardian stones and grants them a variety of magical abilities with which to explore the harsh world beyond the settlement.

A Valley Without Wind is difficult to categorize- it’s essentially a combination of Metroid and Diablo, with elements of a lightweight city-building sim. You’ll spend most of your time exploring a series of randomly-generated continents, seeking the resources you’ll need to destroy an evil overlord and his lieutenants and building up outposts of survivors as you go. The game is a platformer, like Metroid or the latter-day Castlevanias, although it’s a more exploration-centric game than either of those- you’ll be scavanging for supplies in a huge world, not finding abilities to unlock new areas. As you explore, you’ll come across materials that you can use to craft more powerful attacks and unlock new missions and enemy types; you’ll earn the power to place buildings that strengthen you and weaken your enemies; you’ll learn about the cataclysm that befell the world, the wind, and the mysterious stones that protect your settlement. While it’s certainly easy to get sucked into the largely pointless excercise of exploring the world’s every nook-and-cranny, A Valley Without Wind does provide a decent list of short-term, concrete goals. This makes it very easy to pick up and play for half an hour, and also very easy to pick up and play for “half an hour” only to find that half a day has passed.

The biggest drawback of the game is the sameyness of a lot of the world- while areas are randomly generated, they’ll start to look awfully similar after a while. The game goes on forever; defeating the Overlord of a certain continent merely unlocks another, with stronger enemies. Although the first few new continents will unlock new spells and crafting materials as well, that only continues for so long and only offers up so much variety.

The visuals are another major source of controversy; although they’re passable, they never really rise to “good” and more-than-occasionally dip down into “ugly”. This is a game that was produced with a shoestring graphics budget, and that is very clear from playing it. I found myself wishing that they’d opted for the chunky faux-SNES style so common among indie games rather than the very rough-edged attempts at more advanced graphics that they’ve put together instead.

Finally, the tutorial could be a lot better, and it took me a couple hours to grok what I should be doing and how. The game attempts to introduce everything at once, which is both difficult and overwhelming, and makes the game feel more complicated than it is. I spent the first couple hours with the game lost, but eventually picked up on many of the points that should have been better-explained.

All that being said- I’ve put about 30 hours into A Valley Without Wind over the last few months, and I’ve enjoyed it tremendously. The sequel is also available; I’m looking forward to giving that one a try, too, but I’m holding off until I’ve played through a bit more of the original. A Valley Without Wind is available on Steam for both OSX and Windows; a huge demo is also available, both from Steam and the Arcen Games website.